BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT

ASTRONOMY An all-American eclipse Jay Pasachoff enjoys four books heralding this summer’s US total .

n 21 August 2017, the United American Eclipse: A Nation’s Epic States will experience its Race to Catch the Shadow of the first all-American total solar and Win the Glory of the World DAVID BARON Oeclipse. The path of totality’s full Liveright: 2017. shadow — some 100 kilometres wide — will for the first time make land- In the Shadow of the Moon: The fall only in the United States, passing Science, Magic, and Mystery of Solar Eclipses over the homes of 12 million people in ANTHONY AVENI 14 states, from Oregon to the Caroli- Yale University Press: 2017. nas. Heliophysicists and umbraphiles from around the world are prepar- Eclipse: Journeys to the Dark Side of the Moon ing for it, along with Department of FRANK CLOSE

STOCKTREK IMAGES/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE GEOGRAPHIC IMAGES/NATIONAL STOCKTREK Transportation officials. The former Oxford University Press: 2017. are still pondering the results of the Mask of the Sun: The Science, 1999 eclipse, whose path crossed History, and Forgotten Lore of Europe from Cornwall to Romania Eclipses and beyond, and of total eclipses JOHN DVORAK since. The latter are doing their best Pegasus: 2017. to ensure that millions of drivers get safely into and out of the path. Aveni’s In the Shadow of the Moon The fuss is understandable. A total mines observations from five millen- solar eclipse is the most stupendous nia. We learn about eclipses in ancient sight in nature: the abruptly darken- Babylonia, such as those recorded ing sky; Baily’s beads, glints of sun- on a tablet fragment from 280 bc. light shining through lunar valleys; Aveni analyses the story that the the dazzling diamond-ring effect; Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus the spiky, pearly solar corona. Then, predicted the eclipse of 28 May 585 a couple of minutes later, the whole bc, which supposedly halted a bat- show in reverse. Equally compel- tle between the Lydians and Medes; ling is the knowledge that you are he is sceptical of links between these witnessing a , an alignment ancient dates and actual eclipses. of Earth, Moon and Sun that dark- He also delves into total eclipses ens the sky by an additional factor of seen in the United States, such as New 10,000 in the last minute alone. Now, York City’s in 1925: people sat on roofs four books all anticipate the coming The progress of an eclipse seen from Australia in 2012. along the Hudson River to mark the celestial event in different ways. shadow’s lower edge on 96th Street, In American Eclipse, journalist David scattering of sunlight that we see as the inner and the ‘diamond-ring effect’ was mentioned Baron harks back to the total eclipse visible corona would have misleadingly given Edison in the US media for the first time. Aveni con- in the United States in July 1878. (I read this the Sun’s surface temperature, 6,000 °C. cludes that neither rainbows, comets, meteors book in draft and provided a blurb.) A group Baron’s stories are good ones, well told. The nor the aurora borealis surpass “the transient, of eminent scientists, including astrono- pioneering US astronomer Maria Mitchell — exquisite beauty” of a total solar eclipse. mer Henry Draper and his wife, Anna (see the first professor hired at Vassar College in Particle physicist Frank Close tells more- S. Nelson Nature 539, 491–492; 2016), trav- Poughkeepsie, New York — took a group personal stories in Eclipse. In 1954, aged elled to Rawlins, Wyoming, to witness it. But, of alumnae, although they weren’t offered eight, Close viewed a partial solar eclipse; it as Baron relates, 31-year-old whizz-kid inven- free rail travel like their male counterparts. inspired him to become a scientist. Although tor Thomas Edison gained the lion’s share of Astronomer and inventor Samuel Pierpont